The agony has ended. I've finally found suppliers who actually carry stock of Conroe CPUs and compatible motherboards, and made the big plunge.

Now I just have to wait on shipping. There's also a small chance that the place I got the CPU from will be sneaky filthy bastards and drop it on back-order, but we'll see.


The final specs:

• Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo CPU


• Asus P5B-Deluxe Motherboard


• G.Skill 2GB DDR2-800 CAS4 RAM


• Sapphire Radeon X800XL GPU


• Seagate Barracuda 300GB SATA3 HDD

The GPU is easily the weak point in the system, but it's a beefy enough card, and it'll run the stuff I need to work on plenty well. It's also an easy upgrade should the need arise down the road.

So... if the universe decides to play nice with me, I should be free from my sluggish-development woes within a week. I'm not holding my breath, though.

For now I've got my laptop set up and using one of my LCDs as a second display. It's awkward as anything and very annoying to have two totally different-sized monitors, but it's only for a week or two at the most - and the speed gains over my old machine are so huge as to make it more than worth the discomfort.


All told it clocks in at just under $1350, which is a couple hundred more than I originally wanted to spend, but considering the increased wallop of the Conroe CPU and an added 100GB of hard drive space, I think the price difference is more than reasonable.

It'll be almost two months from my original decision to upgrade when I finally get this machine built. Waiting totally sucks.